Chornobyl Liquidators (v0.20)

Chornobyl Liquidators. On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor near Pripyat, Ukraine exploded. In the weeks, months and years that followed, some 600,000 civil and military personnel were brought in to contain the catastrophe the Chernobyl liquidators. Estimates put the number of immediate deaths around 50, but several thousand liquidators are thought to have later died in the aftermath. The reality of Chernobyl was brought back into the popular consciousness in 2019 with the massively successful HBO miniseries. In that show, the first episodes hold an underlying sense of dread as the disaster unfolds before becoming a critique of the true cause of the tragedy mainly, the broken bureaucracy of the Soviet empire in its waning days. Chernobyl Liquidators Simulator taps into the same vein, foregoing the mutants and monsters of previous videogame visits to the site in exchange for a grounded experiential horror from the perspective of those caught up in the response. The demo opens with a cinematic repurposing of historical Soviet footage parades, sputnik, and who’s-whos accented by a bombastic musical score and ominous, stylized text. There are some grammar issues and the exact message is confused, although it certainly sets a tone. The use of “we” is also interesting, both as a way of bringing the player into their role as a Soviet citizen but also as a location signature for Polish developer Live Motion Games. A date card and a short cinematic of helicopters flying towards the reactor smoke cloud comes before a soundscape of dispatch calls with translated text over a black background it seems ripped right from the HBO series. The game proper starts with a first-person perspective view set behind the wheel of a truck pulling up to the site. The game itself or rather, the brief demo that took me about 45 minutes moving at a leisurely pace operates like a fairly simple platformer. In this prologue, the player is one of the firefighters first on-scene, moving and leaping around the crumbling power plant while putting out fires and keeping track of water, health and stamina gauges. The office environments explored are littered with objects and small details, sometimes offering readable notes to give more context to the event.